TMP5: Wayback Machine

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

Some of you may not have heard of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but I’ve known about it for a long time. My peeve is that it exists at all and I’m not the only one ~ they got sued by LinkedIn for data-scraping, but LinkedIn lost. That is unfortunate, imo. How it works is that the WM periodically takes “screenshots” of the internet and posts links back to the original content, so they aren’t “stealing” it, but if you delete something, there’s a chance they’ve already grabbed it. I hate that. Obviously, I have a big stake in this because I like to erase my footprints and start over when the mood takes me, but a lot of my stuff is up there, from 2004 on.

I don’t mind so much that Google has garbage I posted in Groups (and when people quoted my posts). I accept that, even though I don’t love it. Those threads remain in context, at least, and you can see what was going on, if you want to. But blog posts just float out there like balloons, unmoored from their context. It bothers me a lot that there is no easy way to get the IA to take them down. They will ~ but it’s a giant pain in the butt.

The only bright side is that when I went on my frenzy of deleting posts and media recently, I inadvertently trashed my header image and couldn’t find it on my computer. So… I went to the Wayback Machine and fished the image out of their scrapings.

~*~

Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP4: Inconsistency

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

Inconsistency always bugs me, especially my own, but my excuse is that I’m human. What really gets me is when technology doesn’t behave the same way all the time. How is that even possible for a system built on “if x, then y” with no room for interpretation? I keep looking for something I may have done differently, but so maddeningly often there is no explanation.

Take WordPress, forex. Most times when I go to another blog, all is “normal” and I am able to leave a like and/or a comment. Other times, I have to log into my account again before I’m allowed to like/comment. But occasionally, the screen goes blank when I try to re-login and I can’t participate on the post. Whyyy? I do the same things every time!

Here’s another example. I’ve been clicking the “copy post” button to create new posts since my refresh. It’s convenient because some text stays the same. But yesterday I did that for the next SLS and guess what? The copied post didn’t autosave in a new draft and instead “updated” the existing post. Argh! Luckily, there’s a way to grab previous edits, so I was able to return the post to its original form. But whyyy? Why did “copy post” behave differently this time? I just don’t get it.

It’s so frustrating to depend on something that calvinballs at random. I expect that from people, but not from machines. Yeah, yeah, they were designed by people. But still!

~*~

Image altered from the original at Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP2: Apps

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

For a long time, I resisted downloading apps. This wasn’t so much of a philosophical aversion to them as my OCD in keeping my phone looking neat and organized. But slowly, they crept up on me. Oh, the convenience! Right? That’s how they get you. Convenient for who though? It is certainly convenient for merchants to pester us over apps. It is convenient for social media to ding your apps with notifications so you’ll feel compelled to go look (just for a sec!) to see what’s up (and view more ads in the process). Etc.

I downloaded the WordPress app a few years ago and, indeed, it seemed like a great way to view posts and compose them as well. But during my refresh I discovered a couple things. One, your post may appear on the app reader quite differently from the way it looks on your actual blog. This may not bother some people, but I spent (and continue to spend) a lot of time making sure my blog looks the way I want it, so I was pretty horrified to discover messed up line breaks, misaligned images, and screwy fonts. On the app, you can’t see a lot of this stuff.

Two, the app sometimes “forgets” some of your images in your media library, at least mine did (I had thousands of images). It’s not a matter of using the correct search term, since I could search and find the images in my library from a browser. I don’t want to sound nutty, but I think it’s deliberate ~ to get you to download more images and thus run out of library space faster. Then you’ll have to upgrade your plan. Welp, instead of that nonsense, I’ve deleted tons of images. Hah! (You can’t do that unless you’re willing painstakingly sort through all your posts to decided what you want to keep and discard, but I’ve made the time for that.)

Three, I wasn’t getting a sense of other bloggers’ blogs from the app because the “convenience” of reading gobs of posts quickly and dropping likes everywhere kept me from actually visiting their blogs. Since I want people to visit mine, it’s only fair that I visit theirs. This last week, I have been doing so and it’s a better experience. The “downside” is that I no longer have time to skim everything in my feed and plop likes on each item. Oh well. Quality over quantity, amirite?

I have deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps as well. This keeps me from mindlessly clicking on them every time I’m bored. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve been reading more books this year. I’m well on my way to my goal of 100 by December 31.

This isn’t to say all apps are bad. I find the weather app useful, as well as Google maps, email, news, and some others.

~*~

Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP1: April A-Z

Welcome to The Monday Peeve’s refresh!

I have been writing April A-Z posts relating to James Bond during my break (I’m up to L) and it’s been a blast! I’ve been learning a lot and also want to watch the movies all over again now. What’s my peeve then? Same as it’s been before regarding this project ~ the sign-up sheet. I know I signed up early on to do the Bond posts. I had a low number. But poof! My name and everything else is missing from the master list. And when I tried to re-enter my data, the sheet was all messed up and insisted I had another name and wouldn’t let me proceed. Argh! This has happened at least once before, in exactly the same way. Last year I played but didn’t even try to enter my name on the list. (I’ve deleted those posts because I decided I didn’t like them.)

So I guess I’m not “officially” playing this year either, but I still intend to publish the A-Z posts. After April is over, I’ll make a new blog page with the links to each one, in order, so people can read them easy peasy later on. I’m trying not to be fussed about the master list. I hope anyone who is interested in reading about 007 can find my posts regardless.

See you tomorrow, bright and early!

~*~

Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

A Refreshing Smile

My weekly smile is regarding my blog’s refresh. I learned a lot while conforming my older posts to the block editor and deleting posts that don’t make me happy. I view social media/blogging as a hobby, not a job, and I want my writing to reflect this. Not that all posts will be upbeat; I’m reposting plenty of sad poetry. But it will be poetry I like, not lines strung together simply to respond to a prompt. Note, I am not criticizing anyone who has a different view of things, nor am I fussed if you’re trying to make money via blogging. I’m speaking only about myself.

I’ve deleted the WordPress app and have been using a browser exclusively to write and edit. That’s working out much better for me. Apps in general create an aura of mindless clicking and posting (in my case), and one of my goals is to be more mindful of what I write and comment on.

I’ve also discovered that contrary to all I’ve read, we can write single-spaced poetry from our phones. If you hold the shift key while pressing return, you get a single space. You do not have to go into the code and insert “br” a zillion times while deleting the P breaks. Unless I’m writing a haiku or something very short, I do not want my poems to be double-spaced. It looks terrible (imo) and I’m fixing them all ~ the poems I want to keep anyway.

I’m also resizing all my images to “medium” and dumping duplicates. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but it seems that WP encourages multiple uploads of the same image and makes it difficult to find previous ones. Then suddenly your library is full and you have to upgrade. I’ve already cut my library in half and freed up lots of space. While I do have a paid plan to get rid of ads, I don’t want to keep upgrading it.

Also, I’m writing for adults and see no need to insert multiple images in most posts (there are some exceptions, such as when I will be talking about the various actors who played Blofeld). If people are turned off because there are lots of words in my posts and few images/emojis, then they aren’t really my kind of reader. I’ve dumped the Bitmojis for the same reason. I know I may lose some readers and am okay with that.

I had over 100 tags, many of which were other people’s, and I couldn’t even remember whose or why they were there. Some were used only once or twice. I’ve deleted those and streamlined the rest. If I respond to a prompt in the future, I’m not adding a tag just because the prompter asks. If they delete my trackback link because of that, fine. When I was hosting prompts, I never actually searched on the tag ~ I only followed the links in comments.

I’m excited about my refreshed blog. During April I will be doing the A2Z prompt and posting about James Bond. Researching the movies and trivia has been a blast, and I hope at least some of you will enjoy reading it. I also have loads of other reposts scheduled: my favorite fiction and poetry pieces and a few humorous question posts. Most question posts have been deleted. Please don’t take offense if I rarely respond to those kind of posts from now on. I may take one interesting question and write a whole essay on it, but I don’t want my pages to be full of other people’s prompts.

That’s it then. Looking forward to April first!

~*~

Image from Pexels.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

Blog Refresh in Progress!

Hello, friends. Sorry for the sudden disappearance of content, but I decided to make a fresh start April 1. Please look for my James Bond posts for A2Z. Until then, I will be tweaking various aspects of my blog’s layout. Thanks for reading!